I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK

I'm that good kind of tired that comes from getting a lot accomplished during your day.

This morning I met a buddy for breakfast in a little diner down the interstate a ways. We caught up on what's going on with each other and then I headed home. The plan was to attend today's club rocket launch, but I never made it. Shame too, because it was a beautiful day.

Got home and decided to take care of a quick repair job on my truck. Twenty minutes later and a smidgen of epoxy and it looked that it was going to be good as new. Then my neighbor dropped by and asked about taking down that maple tree in my backyard. Well, of course I'm not going to head off for the day while he's doing me a favor, so we got going on that.

Something we saw right off was that the maple was bigger than either of us had realized. At the end of the day, we'd taken down every branch reachable with a fully extended 32' ladder, and there's a lot of tree left above that. We even managed to do it without dropping anything on a fence.

There's a nice pile of twiggy branches out in the common area that my son and I will be taking care of over the next week, and a fair pile of fresh cut maple logs to stack. They'll make nice fireplace and firepit fuel. We really opened up the yard with today's work (pictures to come), but the monster trunk and root system is still in the way.

We're tossing around the idea of taking down my back fence and using some tension ropes and come-alongs to just drop the rest in one swell foop. A couple of hours to set things up just right and fifteen minutes to actually bring the beast to earth. I'm also thinking about getting a tree company out here for an estimate, since we've done everything we can do safely and reasonably easy. The problem with that is that it wouldn't surprise me to get an estimate for a thousand dollars, and there's a lot of other home improvements I could do with that kind of money. Then again, I might just leave it for awhile and see how it's going to be. I'm not in any hurry now that the yard will get some reasonable sunlight.

Can you tell my mind is going a mile a minute? It's been a good day.

Posted by Ted at March 12, 2005 06:35 PM
Category: Square Pegs